I urge you to read Josh Kovensky’s account of how Robert Mueller’s team came to suspect Paul Manafort was not living up to his plea agreement but was instead playing for a pardon from President Trump.
I addressed this on Twitter. Let me try to address it here. Yesterday, freshman member of Congress Ilhan Omar riffed on a tweet by Glenn Greenwald about Kevin McCarthy and pro-Israel politics in Congress.
She responded and here was my response to hers …
McCarthy’s a fool who has no power to punish anyone. Criticism of Israel doesn’t equal anti-Semitism. And this is a very unfortunate tweet. https://t.co/WaCjbr2yNp
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 11, 2019
The Washington Post has a new poll out about Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and that poll shows clearly, for better or worse, why I think he almost certainly won’t be resigning his office. The top line number in the poll is that the state is split 47% to 47% on the question of whether or not he should resign. That’s certainly not great in general. But those aren’t the kind of numbers that make any elected leader actually step down. The underlying numbers though are even more revealing. Read More
I confess to being more than a little confused by this piece by Politico cofounder John Harris. Harris started out as a political reporter in Richmond. So it’s about the recent chaos and plunge toward the abyss in Virginia state government and the state Democratic party. As he summarizes it on Twitter, “The good old days in Virginia were bad. These days are worse…”
In other words, Virginia’s current political leaders don’t match up to the virtue and valor of those from the old days. Read More
Unsurprisingly, the Trump Inaugural was a veritable orgy of Trump world sloppiness and sleaze, well beyond even conventional Washington buck-raking standards. Here’s why prosecutors are so interested.
Last night I wrote a couple quick posts on Jeff Bezos’s revelation about The National Enquirer, its parent company AMI and its attempt to blackmail him with ‘intimate photos’. This isn’t just a tabloid story. I suspect this is a huge story with potentially mammoth implications. I wrote this post explaining why and this one about key clues Bezos left in his public statement.
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In addition to the all the bombshellish parts of that Jeff Bezos posts I discussed below, there are a few breadcrumbs strewn through the text that may reveal more than it seems on a quick read. Let’s go over them. Read More
Late this afternoon, Jeff Bezos published a letter on Medium that is, frankly, one of the most stunning things I’ve ever read. It is also extremely important, far beyond the celebrity gossip of a billionaire caught in an affair or compromising photographs. Read More